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How to work your Bear in 4.0.1 (and 4.0.3)

Like my hunter post this will be short and to the point. This is a ‘get you up and running’ post and not a serious attempt at theory crafting. I have only tanked 2 or 3 runs so far with my bear so I don’t know everything there is to know about it. This intended to be a quick start guide to show the basics of how to play a bear in 4.0.1 (and in 4.0.3)

First off your aoe threat will be crap. No really. It will be rather bad. Swipe on a cooldown is fairly painful. Don’t give up the bear yet though. We have other things going on now. For one thing single target threat is insane. Seriously. I was pulling stuff off other tanks without using taunts, without trying to, and when they had a head start on the threat.

So let’s get to it…

Glyph your maul. Yeah you probably already had that but make sure. You will need it.

Spec

For a spec check out Uncrittable or Big Bear Butt. They both have some that are good. Mine is pretty close to those. Don’t bother checking mine. I just slapped some stuff in there.

Rotation

Well it is more of a priority/rotation. Whatever.

You still want to swipe all you can. If you are going to be doing AOE threat you will need to tab target and maul a lot too. If you are doing single target threat it is the same as before, lots of lacerate.

But wait! There is more!

Whereas before we did heavy single target damage with lots of lacerate… and after the first 5 we were wasting it and filling in with FF and maul instead, now we have a new tool. Pulverize! This thing eats your lacerates so you will not waste their dots. And lacerate only goes to 3 stacks. My rotation so far has been this.

Lacerate-lacerate-lacerate-pulverize *repeat*

Filling in with swipes and mauls as needed for multi target threat. This does a metric ton of single target threat and pretty solid tank dps too. There are probably many ways to improve on it so don’t take this as the final word. It is merely a workable first word.

Keep in mind we still have feral fearie fire and growl for grabbing things at range… BUT WAIT!! There is MORE!

At long last, all your caster mobs are belong to me. We finally have a ranged silence… sort of. In the past bears have had no ability to move ranged casters around. It was line-of-sight or nothing. Now we can. It is not much, but we CAN! It is called

What it does is a short range charge (about 8 yards) with no minimum range. So you can use it on things right in your face. It also is an interrupt and short silence. So you can use it to reposition casters. Bears Rejoice!

AOE threat…

AOE threat in 4.0.1 is not as stupid simple as it was. Between the swipe cooldown and the massive ‘thorns’ nerf your easy-peezy aoe threat tools are gone. Now you have to work at it.

You have charge in fast and get your first swipe off as soon as targets are in range. You might need to follow up with a quick ‘demoralizing roar’ if there are targets your swipe did not hit. Expect someone to pull off you right away. Everyone is still AOE happy and you can be almost certain some mage is opening up with blizzard. If a hunter pulls off let them die. Any hunter that can’t figure out how to use misdirect needs to spend some time in the Bee Pit.

To build up AOE threat you are probably going to need to be target swapping and spreading around your maul and some lacerate. With maul hitting two targets and your lacerating a little on everything in a pack you CAN hold aoe agro. It is just not as easy as it was. You might have to get a lot better with your taunts. If you are rage starved you can spread around some FFF too. That still costs no rage so use it as needed. AOE threat is NOT broke. Bears are not broken. Their AOE threat was just over powered before and now it takes actual skill. You have to be reactive and adaptive. If you have to, beg your dps to follow kill order and start marking things. Your single target threat should be sky-high so if you can just get people to shoot your target your agro issues will vanish.

Personally I am happy about the changes. Bear tanking had become for me nothing but spamming one button (swipe macroed to maul) and charging from pack to pack. It was pretty boring really. Now it is challenging and interesting again. Good luck!

Like I said, this is just a quick start guide. If it is not enough keep ‘googling’ and you will find more detailed and in-depth information.

The wife respecced her level 59 bear and wanted to try Hellfire Ramparts.

We first did it in easy mode (5-manning it) but she did not learn anything as the (level 59-62) group managed over 3300 DPS as a group. Trash died so quickly it was not even funny.

We did it next the usual way (3-manning it) with a 61 hunter found in the regional chat. Our combined DPS was a little over 850 (I healed on my 59 restoration shaman) and it was fun. We experimented by having the hunter burn his CDs as soon as the bear was charging but he was never able to pull aggro on skull. Multi-shotting in the first 5 seconds of a pull was a problem however as bear now have to learn to time their first swipe *just so* to hit all mobs. We had two multi-pack accidental pulls and it was no problem with CD activated.

Well noted about that first swipe. The first few seconds are trickier than they were. Discounting overgeared ‘gogogo’ers it is more of a challenge on dps to be sane and to shoot skill than it is on anyone else.

I was actually having issues pulling agro off of other tanks in raids with my single target rotation. I am not surpised at all that the hunter could not pull off.

I guess Bliz figures if they are nerfing AOEs and bringing back crowd control the least they can do is to buff single target tank threat.

I know mine does. She can be a terror to tanks. Her favorite is popping MD and then using my Nitro Boosts run far far away and pop some group. With luck and FD most of the group is dead before the tank catches up.

Most bee pits are just not deep enough for the likes of Approximate. That elf is crazy.

I was/am a boomkin, but always wanted to ty tanking, so I dual specced into a bear tank. Never tanked before…this site has helped me understand the fundamentals of tanking. But I am struggling to generate rage in the beginning of the pull, and am not 100% sure of my rotation. For single mobs, i’ll cast FFF to get the attention, and then let it hit me to generate some rage. Then I lacerate, mangle, lacerate,lacerate,pulverize or maul to maintain aggro. I struggle with packs, especially with no rage. Any suggestions?

First of all, the pre-pre-pull. At the end of a fight, stop using moves. Keep auto attacking. You will only need to do this on the last target, for two or three auto attacks. You should have plenty of threat at the tail end of the fight so there is no reason to blow some big move to finish things off. That will allow you to have plenty of rage at the end of a fight. It makes your recount meters lower but who cares.
Second the ‘pre pull: Before you even pull you want to do two things. If you have no rage at all the first thing you do its power shift. By that I mean pop out of bear and then back into bear form. If you have the right talent points this causes you to generate a little rage. If you don’t have those points go get them. Obviously if you HAVE rage from a previous fight you don’t want to ‘power shift’ since that will drain it.
Next, you pop ‘engage’. I like to do it as soon as the previous fight ends. That move generates some nice rage but it also causes you to take extra damage for a few seconds. So it is good to pop it right after one fight so the ‘more damage’ part is almost gone before I start the next fight. Also you can just right click the enrage ‘buff’ and drop that off. Enrage gives you rage but also it trickles in a little more rage over a few seconds. It is a great way of preserving your rage between fights.
Third, the pull. FFF is a good way of starting in many situations but it has a big drawback. That drawback is that your DPS gets to watch the targets run over to you and then they expect that you will have rage and instantly have plenty of threat. Also healers tend to ‘pre-hot’ or bubble you while the targets are running over. Naturally that pulls things off you. It is great that FFF does not use rage but those other drawbacks cause you to start the fight ‘virtually rage starved’ that is they make you start right off needing to catch up with everyone’s threat.
Why charge is better: Charge gets you in the fight instantly and everyone else has to run to catch up. This gives you a head start in time and time = rage. The DPS and heals, with any luck will have to move to engage and that helps a lot. Also those precious seconds you saved by charging in mean you lost less of the rage from the previous fight. Using these tactics, should put you in the fight a second or two ahead of everyone else and with plenty of rage.
Remember, rage starvation is a strategic failure, not a tactical one. That means to keep your range where you want it requires preplanning and long range thinking. If you don’t even look at your rage until you are starting to pull then you are already in trouble. Plan ahead!
You might even go back and respec into things that give you more rage. Some ‘optimal’ talent builds will skip points that do more rage because raid tanks don’t usually need those. So if you used a cookie cutter build you might have missed something.
Next comment, aoe agro rotation…

AOE agro is a LOT more challenging now than it was before 4.0.1. But it is still doable. Before it was so stupid simple that it was boring. Now it can be a bit of work.
Step one, mark something. This can really help. Yeah many people ignore marks but many don’t. You only need a couple of your dps to actually follow kill order it give you a big break. Don’t bother marking all of them, just toss a skull on one and pull. I do this by using ‘key bindings’ to map my number pad ‘zero’ to the skull mark. It is super easy to reach over and hit that even as I am in the middle of a charge.
Rotation: You have to swipe every time it is off cooldown. You also need to open with swipe the instant all or most of the party is in range. The rotation you described is pretty good, but you should do a couple things to it. One, add ‘swipe’ and two, add ‘tab’
Mine opening looks more like swipe, lacerate, mangle, pulverize, tab, maul, swipe, tab, lacerate, *manually click the guy that pulled off* growl, lacerate, swipe, lacerate, pulverize, etc.
Pulverize with 3 lacerates up is great, but it is no good if something else pulled off. You HAVE to open with a swipe and swipe often or the healer will pull off you. You also have to get some good up front agro on the ‘skull’ or some hard core dps will pull off you. Also having maul glyphed to hit two targets is really useful. Spreading that around helps. Don’t forget that your demo roar is also aoe threat. Not a lot of AOE threat but it is some. I use it if the pull was sloppy and I did not hit all the targets with swipe. It buys me a second or so of the healer not pulling off while I line up extra attacks.
In addition to tab I use a good name plates addon (tidy plates, gray tank mode) so I see when the pull off and I can easily click them. It also shows me WHO pulled off and that is handy. People pull off me ALL the time these days. The key is that I taunt things back so fast most of the time no one notices.
So your targeting order is something like this:
Hit skull with a swipe, and some big hits.
Hit any other target with a maul and a swipe
Hit the skull again for some big hits
Hit a third target with a good lacerate or two
Back on skull, it is almost down
Taunt the 4th guy that just pulled off you, hit it good and hard, swipe again.
Skull is dead now. Try to guess while your dpsers just switched to.
Start tabbing around and get some more agro on everything, if anything is less than 1/3 health and pulls off you now you don’t have to worry about it much. It will be dead before it does much damage.
On the last target stop using anything except auto attack when it is a few seconds from dead.

One last word on rage. It is not things HITTING you that gets you good rage. It is you hitting other things. It is auto-attacking. It does HUGE rage every swing. I like to look for spiders, roaches and other critters and do an auto-attack swing at them between pulls. That really helps a lot. Using charge for your pull means you get 1-3 auto-attacks before anyone joins in the fight. That is a lot of rage.

Good luck! Don’t forget the 2 piece t10 set bonus is 20% damage boost to swipe.